Bashiok Says: No Mana/Health Leech

Leeching was way too strong in Diablo 2. Im not surprised they want to do something about it.
At the same time howver, leeching had one great thing about it: Action-based healing. To leech health/mana, you had to attack.
That seems to be pretty much what they aim to achieve with the health orb system too. You cant just run away and regen. For that reason alone, leeching is much less important in Diablo 3. And orb dropping will be easier to balance.

Imo the best way to go would be having limited leeching. For example, using arbitrary numbers, you could have max 2% leeching, spread between health and mana regen. Getting those 2% should be harder than it was in Diablo 2. By setting the limit for the two leech effects combined rather than individual, you add some choice to it. Some would prefer 2% health leech, others a more balanced 1% health, 1% mana, etc.
Leeching has to provde a quite small benefit to work in D3 though, as Romak said, having points in energy was pretty pointless due to mana leeching, it can only be a good thing to fix it.
Leeching, if in the game, should be small enough to be balanced (which it wasnt in D2), but also high enough to add some incentive to dmging enemies (beside getting health orbs from the mobs).

Strange... I probably never played as much d2 as some or most of you guys here, and i almost never had a char with life leech.... and still had a great deal FUN playing the game.

I'm almost thinking the same thing.

Either way, we already know that Barbarians have a SPELL that does life leech, so I wonder if 'no life leech' means that they may not include it as a gear modifier to not ruin the balance since now classes have it as an ability?

the health globes already give enough life/mana back as it is.
I think they're trying to remove life/mana leech and force us in a way not to use pots very often to use more thinking in our attacks and to time the use of the globes well.
The game will become much more challenging now, especially if they keep the hardcore mode.

Leech is just another cookie-cutter way almost like pots.
Even though you have to slay monsters for it (like health globes), its easy to achieve high amounts of leech which fills very much hp in a few hits.

Perhaps it could work with a percentage chance of leeching on hit. Also the max chance as well as leech percentage should be limited. Certain monsters would be not leechable or less leachable. (No leech on skeletons, less on zombies but more on the fat ones etc. etc.)

Also as you see, mana/fury refills quickly and they seem to try to make combat with single monster groups short but intense.

buyable pots - helps very much to play..
leech mana, leech health - helps very very much to play..
so.. i guess diablo3 will be more suited for hardcore gamers + im happy because they took some new decisions =]
i guess we will depend more on weaps and armor now..
P.S. and now only pupy cute kiddies will cry..no leech bhaa..harder to play with boses and with exploding white dollys who will come back in d3 i hope mhaha

Leech is just another cookie-cutter way almost like pots.
Even though you have to slay monsters for it (like health globes), its easy to achieve high amounts of leech which fills very much hp in a few hits.

Exacly. Leech brings to the table the same problems lots of potions did for D2: Unkillable characters, leading to monsters having to almost 1-shot at all times to have any hopes of killing the player. Potions were scaled down to address this problem, and it appears leech is as well.

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From what was said about Diablo 3 I think I can say that it is a good thing that they remove health leech. I'm saying this based on the health leech system from diablo 2.

This is what I think because it has been said that monsters won't hit has hard as in diablo 2 and that fact make a big difference because for example: if Diablo 2 monster take 50% of your health and Diablo 3 monsters take 15% of your health.
If this is the kind of difference that will be seen in diablo 3, the diablo 2 health leech system could make you invincible as long as you can hit the enemies.

So either health leech system need to be weaker or no leech health in the game.

I did not talk about mana leech because I don't know if it would be good or not to have.

p.s: I think the whirlwind skill could be a skill that we can get pretty fast in the games, because it look like its might be weaker than the whirlwind of diablo 2, the one in the gameplay video show that at level 1 it do 25% of weapon damage, that is not strong and the next level only add 5 more %.

nah, it looked like there was life/mana/fury regen in the gameplay video (at a crazy rate that was probably just for demonstrations sake).

mana leech would be pretty useless now in Diablo 3 since melee chars that could take advantage of it (see barbarian) dont use mana anymore (fury says hello) and mana leech never worked with spells anyway.
On the class thats gonna be similar to the amazon, i dont know, but i'm sure they thought about it before making any decisions.

This isn't so bad, as long as they are sure to give some characters the ability to allow it (like the Necro's life tap) this may help enforce an emphasis on partying too! And I best that they will substitute the leeching ability, with an ability to make enemies drop more orbs... this will really change the dynamics of play.

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